Fix black screen in Raspberry Pi with HDMI to VGA adapter

Posted by on 2013/05/28 Leave a comment (11) Go to comments

If you use an HDMI to VGA adaptor and get a black screen you may tweak the config.txt to solve the problem.

HDMI-VGA

If you open config.txt you will see that there are plenty of lines commented out that change the behavior of the HDMI output in the Raspberry Pi. This is the configuration that made my Raspberry Pi work OK using an HDMI to VGA adapter at 1920×1080 resolution:

disable_overscan=1
hdmi_group=1
hdmi_mode=16
hdmi_drive=2

hdmi_group defines the HDMI type (Not specifying the group, or setting to 0 will use the preferred group reported by the edid):

  • hdmi_group=1 – CEA
  • hdmi_group=2 – DMT

hdmi_mode defines screen resolution in CEA or DMT format.

hdmi_drive chooses between HDMI and DVI modes:

  • hdmi_drive=1 – Normal DVI mode (No sound)
  • hdmi_drive=2 – Normal HDMI mode (Sound will be sent if supported and enabled)

If you want to know which modes (hdmi_mode) are suported by your screen comment the lines for those 4 options (thus leaving all with their default values), reboot and the run those commands:

For hdmi_group=1 available modes:

sudo /opt/vc/bin/tvservice -m CEA

For hdmi_group=2 available modes:

sudo /opt/vc/bin/tvservice -m DMT

See all available options at http://elinux.org/RPi_config.txt

Source: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=33477

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11 Comments.

  1. Romo Sunday June 30th, 2013 at 08:08 PM

    Thanks mate. I looked at 10s of pages and wasted 1-2 hours before i found this post!! thanks.

    Reply
  2. Jan Saturday July 13th, 2013 at 01:03 AM

    Thanks man, u saved me a lot of time….

    Reply
  3. Kevin Friday July 19th, 2013 at 10:21 PM

    Thank you, was pulling my hair out! All other advice was useless.

    Reply
  4. chambrot Thursday August 1st, 2013 at 02:57 AM

    I got this running…but I get no sound. Any tips?

    Thanks in advance!

    J

    Reply
  5. Akhilesh Thursday September 12th, 2013 at 05:17 AM

    Thanks mate worked perfectly !!

    Reply
  6. Vinod Shankar Monday December 23rd, 2013 at 01:13 PM

    Hi There,

    How’s it going? I just got my Raspberry Pi board delivered a week ago. I had this ordered locally along with a clear case and a power adapter.

    Eager to get started I bought a keyboard and mouse, SD memory card (16GB) and HDMI to VGA convertor.

    Reason being my monitor doesn’t have a HDMI slot. I have formatted and installed Noobs 1.3 on the card.

    So I go ahead and connect the network cable and start up the board. Nothing appears on the screen until I press option 2.

    Then I see the familiar OS options screen and install Raspbian as default.

    Install goes smoothly till I see the install completed message.

    When I reboot all I see is a black screen. Any ideas on what to do next? Appreciate some advise.

    Thanks

    Reply

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